Aight Lunetta Heads, it's that time again I just checked the original post by Psyingo and it was dated May 7, 2011. It's now Sept 15, 2012 so over a year has passed since Psyingo issued his challenge last year. Many entered, few succeded, and nobody won the competition because there was no voting!

We all did, however, regardless of how far we each got, enjoy the competition immensely! For this reason I propose that we make the challenge be an annual event, a yearly celebration of CMOS inspiration! Yeah, let's do it!

Here are this year's rules:

1. You buy one grab bag containing IIRC 25 CMOS chips of unknown type from Electronics Goldmine.
2. You build a circuit with essentially no other chips, some exceptions allowed such as speaker or headphone drivers, LED drivers, transistors, resistors, capacitors, and unique transducers. However, the guts and heart and soul of your circuit must be constructed from the CMOS chips that you receive in your grab bag.
3. There is a deadline this year, which I propose shall be midnight on December 31, in other words the end of the year is the end of the competition, and voting for the winner shall commence at that time, no exceptions.
4. If you don't like my rules you may propose alternative rules in this thread until a set of rules satisfactory to all is reached.

OK, four rules is too many so I'll stop there. You get the idea. Let's buy our grab bags and have a heck of a good time! Go for it this year!!!

I have only two problems, both with the 25 IC grab bag;
Firstly, I can't seem to locate it on electronics goldmine and I'm in the UK so postage would probably cost ten times more than the ICs (which I could get cheaper in the UK at rapid or spiratronics or something)
Secondly, with 25 ICs I will be making things forever! Surely that is too many!?!? You could build like 5 lunetta machines with that many ICs! _________________As a mad scientist I am ruled by the dictum of science: "I could be wrong about this but lets find out"

doh! and i just bought four grab bags! OK, here are responses to your thoughts:

Joe, what we did last year for Dr. Offset who is in New Zealand and cannot afford shipping is I bought two bags and chose one at random for myself, and posted a list of chips in the OTHER grab bag for him. Shipping issue solved and he need only buy or have or scrounge the ones he wants to use of the 25.

trav, same as Joe, I have four bags coming so I can pick one at random for you too.

I presume Dr. Offset will want in too, so the third bag is tentatively his, and of course the fourth bag is mine.

If that is not satisfactory, I will be happy to code a pseudorandom CMOS IC selector in ChucK or LSL, your choice.

And you know me, I can't keep any secrets, what I plan to do this time is design the circuitry in Eagle and have the circuit board made at www.BatchPCB.com. Then I'll fix any errors or design flaws on the board I receive and have a nice clean design to send in just in case anyone wants to build my entry. I'll sell the boards for just a squeak above cost to cover silly details like postage or whatever, but basically do it at cost + tiny delta for meself, sounds good eh?

Oh, and one more note about the quantity of 25 chips being a lot: well, you'd be surprised how many totally useless chips you get. Noninverting buffers, timer/counters of six different flavors when all you want is a single 40106 chip for the oscillators, transistor arrays, and nonsense like that which may be useful chips in some practical designs but not normally preferred for Lunetta purposes.

Last year my grab bag did not have a single Schmidt trigger part so I had to use a multiple -gate oscillator for a clock. My solution was to use two NAND gates in an SRFF configuration and put RC feedback on them, making a stable oscillator with interesting properties. I like to create rather than copy circuits, and I enjoyed pulling that one out of my hat. I only mention it because it's an example of the kind of creativity you will need to succeed in this challenge, as you might imagine.

Great! I promise to select all four bags in some random way, not sure what yet. In fact, I may have YOU pick your bag by number, that will be a totally blind way of selecting, so get your inner mantra cranked up to get the best bag! haha!

I like everything said in the above posts email or pm me a list of chips and I can almost certainly get them from my favorite supplier.
I was also thinking about random number generators to select the ICs, I know of a few online but not every number between 4000 and 5000 is used is it? And what about the ones with five numbers or letters in thier code? (like the every faithful 40106) so we'd have to perhaps do something more complex, as Les suggested very well; a program to select random cmos ICs, that sounds great

P.S. I have enough money to buy a spacializer now les _________________As a mad scientist I am ruled by the dictum of science: "I could be wrong about this but lets find out"

So it's settled then, we shall at least the three of us hold this competition for year 2! I'm sure when Psyingo wakes up and sees this he will join in, and Draal and everyone else from last year plus some newbies. We could have a great new tradition here, to use an oxymoron if you don't mind.

About the spacializer, I am missing a chip to build them, and I will order said chip (4052? I forget) this weekend, JingleJoe.

I'm interested, unfortunately I did JUST order a stack of things from EG so I may have to figure out something to go with it to justify the shipping. I certainly have plenty of CMOS already on hand.

Damn you Les I have serious work to get done, and you distract me!

Edit: Random Generation is easy: dump a list of the chips into a table and pick a random table entry. So if there were 600 4000 series chips, you'd just generate a string of random numbers from 1 - 600, as many as you like. You wouldn't even have to sort the table, though I probably would.

elmegil, we didn't have any judging last year, so there is no set criteria for judging. I guess we will have to propose something such as a vote. A breadboard entry is perfectly acceptable - mine was last year.

If we are to use the EG grab bags, random generation is almost guaranteed to not be equivalent. Their chip selection is almost certainly a function of what they have in stock, most notably surplus items that are not selling mixed with some popular items perhaps, I don't know. I do know, however, that it is highly unlikely that any random CMOS chip generator would be algorithmically equivalent to the EG process.

I do know, however, that it is highly unlikely that any random CMOS chip generator would be algorithmically equivalent to the EG process.

From what I've heard you could just throw in a dozen standard inverters and it will get much closer to the real thing _________________As a mad scientist I am ruled by the dictum of science: "I could be wrong about this but lets find out"

I was just about to start a thread titled "Which 10 chips would you use?"
Then I saw this one.
I don't want to hijack this thread with my ramblings, but I'd like you Lunettaestros to check it out. It would be great to get your ideas. _________________What makes a space ours, is what we put there, and what we do there.

the random number generator is fine and all, providing you have all the chips. not sure how many people have access to ALL possible cmos combinations to make the selection.

[cynical]
i would put the bag method way above a random number generator for this reason alone, and the possiblilty of the generator generating chips you dont like the look of. "well hey now look at that, the random number generator gave me 5 4069's"(after the 40th attempt)
[/cynical]

that being said, i too would be interested in participating and receiving a bad of chips, if thats at all possible? :p__________________Richard_

I doubt the random number thing would be a true example of an EG selection. What would be more accurate would be to make sure 70-80% of your chips were useless shit, say at least a dozen or so being 7 segment decoders. Also no nand gates, xor or 40106 . You need to throw in two or three TTL to allow for the language barrier and a couple of burnt out ICs for the 'you get what you pay for' experience. You might want to mail it to yourself via Antarctica or or the Moon, just so it arrives late. And makesure you get your street number mixed up.

I doubt the random number thing would be a true example of an EG selection. What would be more accurate would be to make sure 70-80% of your chips were useless shit, say at least a dozen or so being 7 segment decoders. Also no nand gates, xor or 40106 . You need to throw in two or three TTL to allow for the language barrier and a couple of burnt out ICs for the 'you get what you pay for' experience. You might want to mail it to yourself via Antarctica or or the Moon, just so it arrives late. And makesure you get your street number mixed up.

yeah, most of the chips i got were complete garbage in the lunetta sense for my drum machine. but that is fun, having to figure out wtf you are going to do with 4 non inverting buffers. or 7 segment decoders.

its called a challenge. its not just about getting your familiar chips and making another 6 oscillator box with a couple xor gates combining the outputs. i originally proposed the challenge to do exactly that, challenge your minds with some random ic selections to get people thinking creatively.

that said, i think i have a grab bag available for someone, if they can pay shipping and 5$ for the bag itself. it was originally for sonic, but he has since not claimed his prize, so instead of having it rot in my parts drawer i offer it up here.

i may be able to do this challenge again. ii will either make a video box of some kind or a bass synth.

they are both "intact", i.e. still have all the chips (and none other) on them they came with...
i'll have a friend choose one of those two for me, so I don't pick consciously:)...

not sure if pollin send anywhere except for Ger/Aut/Swiss, but this might be an interesting offer for European board members. (should there be enough interest, I can offer to order some for redistribution - but it would have to be rather soon, as I'm planning to relocate mid october - best pm me!)
a word of advice - all the three packs I ordered so far (one quite some time ago) came with quite a few 4042s* and often quite many of one sort with just the occasional "interesting" chip in between...

all in all there are/were some: 4049B(!), 4052, 4001, 4009, 4030 and some more - just to give a you a rough picture. also quite a few of the chips are from 'old' Eastern Germany... so far all those I tested have worked (and were pin -and all else-compatible with the respective western datasheets...

edit:
had 'my lucky charm' pick one of the packs for me last night. here's what i'm gonna be working with:

I got the four bags of chips from Electronic Gold Mine today. I labelled them A, B, C, and D. I flipped a coin twice where A=TT, B = TH, C=HT, and D=HH, and got TT, so I get bag A! Bags B, C, and D are available to by list to Joe, trav, and whoever else needs this service. I'll report on the contents of bag A next post.

So I have oodles of logic gates, some flip flops, a dual counter and two muxes. I think I'll use the muxes for spatialization and the counters for boolean sequencers, and do something creative with the flip flops. We'll see. I'll get started tonight!

I'm in. Never finished last years challenge project, but the 100 or so unfinished projects laying around here have never stopped me from starting another.

I suggest we have a vote for last years winner, especially if we're looking at making this an annual event. I was trying to figure out who actually finsished stuff last year and I found sndbyte and Psyingo posted their designs and audio, Draal and Les posted audio files. Are there others in the running?

I'm in. Never finished last years challenge project, but the 100 or so unfinished projects laying around here have never stopped me from starting another.

I suggest we have a vote for last years winner, especially if we're looking at making this an annual event. I was trying to figure out who actually finsished stuff last year and I found sndbyte and Psyingo posted their designs and audio, Draal and Les posted audio files. Are there others in the running?

Perhaps this from mosc in the previous thread is why no winners were chosen?

Quote:

So, go ahead and have a deadline as you suggest. Please, no winners and losers. The quality and originality of the work should be reward in itself, and working on something like this with others throughout the electro-music world will make it loads of fun. And, those of us that aren't building will greatly enjoy watching as these things evolve.

I'm not objecting to the concept myself, but I figured his wishes had a bit of weight....

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